Los Angeles is in a unique position to host the 2028 Summer Olympics, according to Casey Wasserman, because of its seat in the capital of entertainment and technology in the United States. But with 11 years to prepare for the Games, what role will current and emerging technologies play?
Wasserman, the founder and CEO of Wasserman Media Group, and the chairman of L.A.’s Olympic bid, has some ideas.
“To think about an Olympic Games in Los Angeles where you’re gonna have 12 million people, and the ability to use technology to make the experience for those 12 million people, the experience for the athletes, the experience for the family, infinitely better is meaningful,” Wasserman said at AT&T Shape in Los Angeles.
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He related a story about himself and Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti attending last year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and nearly getting lost after the opening ceremony. If their credentials came embedded with GPS chips or locators, someone would always know where they were. The same credentials could also be used as athletes’ village room keys for the athletes who, Wasserman said, often lose or forget their keys while focusing on their training or event.
Virtual and augmented reality, Wasserman said, have a long way to go, but by 2028 will likely feature very prominently in the Los Angeles games. Augmented reality specifically presents “a meaningfully significant opportunity,” he said, because of it’s ability to bring viewers around the world right into the middle of events.
But as with most sporting events, the likeliest place for technological innovation is in media — how the events are presented to the entire world. The advent of recent technologies has allowed broadcasters to know their exact target audience and therefore present events in ways that reach different demographics.
“What technology allows and the new platforms allow is that you can actually find every one of those people directly,” Wasserman said, “as opposed to putting it on Turner and marketing it enough and hoping that people turn it on.”
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Another aspect of the 2028 Olympics that could be significantly influenced by technology is the athletes and sports themselves. With ever more advancements in sports science, wearables that provide physical analysis, and other health- and performance-focused technologies, by the time 2028 rolls around, athletes could be performing on an unprecedented level with the help of information and technology.
“It relates directly to how does technology give them (the athletes) better information. And the argument we made on behalf of our bid was we have the resources in this community to help athletes understand that, to perform better,” Gene Sykes, the CEO of the 2028 Olympic bid, said last month on a panel at USC’s Body Computing Conference. “But that should be a model for everybody; it’s not just the high-performance athlete, it’s every individual who thinks of the high-performance athlete benefiting from technology and information in a way that makes their life different.”
And with higher-performing athletes come, presumably, more eyes on the events being broadcast. NBCUniversal recently announced an extension of its partnership with Snap Inc. and Buzzfeed to present Olympic content for the upcoming Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, on Snapchat’s Our Story and Publisher Stories features. Sykes thinks that with the tech to come in the next 11 years, social media titans such as Facebook and Snap — as well as Alibaba, which has partnered with the International Olympics Committee through 2028 — will be able to create an environment of goodwill around their presentations and interests in the Olympics.
“We’re the world’s best storytellers, and we create the technology that allows people to see that,” Wasserman said. “And there’s no greater set of stories for 17 days than the Olympic Games, and our ability to present that in a new and interesting and engaging way is truly unique.”